Monday, February 05, 2007

Free previews of worthlessness

Okay, Scream TV is having a month long Free Preview for ExpressVu subscribers. The problem here, like most other free previews, is that there's nothing there to really make people want to subscribe to the channel in the first place. Sure, there's a Masters of Horror marathon in the middle of the night, but actually it is punishment enough. The November G4TechTV one was pretty rank as well, featuring mostly repeats, but the unannounced second month (in December) was fairly decent. Nothing to make me want to spend money on the channel, but it was better than the mediocrity that was November.

It seems to be a trend with Canadian pay/digital channels to save the best stuff for the paying subscribers, and to 'treat' the non-subscribers to crap. Why is it this way? Not sure, but it's been going on since the days of First Choice and Superchannel, and it looks like it's going to progress.

Mind you, the digital channels aren't exactly all they're cracked up to be these days, any ways. Scream is playing more SF and Action movies than horror and suspense, or so it feels. (They just did a marathon of the Sony owned heisei-series Godzilla flicks, for crying out loud.) Drive-In is airing a lot of TV series, and really hasn't been particularly good since it originally started up. Action and Diva basically have no identities of their own any more, if they even did in the first place. I have no doubt that the upcoming animé and martial arts channels will be exactly the same, that after the initial surge, they'll drop off the quality map.

Which is probably why I don't ever want to subscribe to these channels, and why I continue to build my DVD library. Basically, there really isn't much I want to watch on TV that's beyond my initial channel package. Which is too bad, as the niche channels could have held my interest if they'd kept up the quality.

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